To describe and analyze the attitudes of the Russian
symbolists to the events of the period from 1914 to 1918, Hellman gives detailed attention to the eight principal Russian
symbolists.
Of course, at the same time, such an exhibition is a big challenge and risk because in France the creative work of the Baltic
Symbolists is almost completely unknown.
Redon was indeed considered by his contemporaries to be the leading
Symbolists painter of the day, yet he distanced himself from such categorization and did not consider himself a member of any
symbolist group.
Albrecht approaches this question by examining how different schools of poetry, from the Parnassians to the
Symbolists and the Decadents, approach music.
Chapters follow on each of the salient stylistic and ontological areas where tempered modernist practice differs from
symbolist: the emphasis on clarity and precision, on simple diction rather than hieratic obscurity; the focus on this world rather than mystical other worlds; the reduction in prominence of the poetic self.
symbolists. Adolphe Rette would later nostalgically recall the
Realists and
symbolists, More says, are both naturalists who choose the side of physis against nomos, and for a narrative technique they employ the subjectivist portrayal of mental awareness called "stream of consciousness" which insults human dignity by reducing man to his moment-to-moment life of sensations and erupting urges, and which repudiates "rational selection and spiritual authority"--so that, as he says in an essay on Joyce, "the only law governing the flux is the so-called association of ideas, the fact that one image by some chance similarly evokes another, and one sensation fades into another." (12) The soul submitting unresistingly to this flow is passively dissolved and expansively diluted and opened to degeneration.
In 1899 appeared the first version of his book The
Symbolist Movement in Literature.
More interested in highlighting the relative strengths and weaknesses of various "perspectives" than in writing a purely diachronic history of theories, Bell traces the genealogy of three broad methodological approaches: (1) those seeking the origins and/or essence of ritual; (2) functionalists and structuralists; and (3) culturalists, including
symbolists, linguists, "performance" theorists, and most recently, the "practice" theorists who have most deeply influenced Bell's own approach.
The new exhibition [*] at London's Tate Gallery at Millbank is an astonishing attempt to portray the mind of a vastly prolific, often perverse genius who inspired as diverse a range of apostles as the Pre-Raphaelites, Proust, Morris, the
Symbolists, Tolstoy, the Labour Party and Gandhi and hence some of the make-up of modern India and Britain.
The internal chapters of Wagner in Russia devoted to "Wagner and the
Symbolists" prove to be the most provocative and, for those new to the topic, the most surprising, as Bartlett introduces the principal Russian
Symbolist writers, all of whom were receptive to German culture.
His perceptions are unfailingly astute, whether the subject is japonisme, Baudelaire's art criticism, a reinterpretation of Watteau's L'Embarquement pour Cythere, or Debussy's relation to the realists,
symbolists and impressionists.
Only a few representative poems of the Russian
symbolists are cited, whereas 402 pages of the study present Hellman's uninspiring critical discourse.
Only those
Symbolists like Briusov and (to a lesser extent) Blok who could be claimed as friends of the new order received their appointed places in the Soviet history of Russian Symbolism.
